Preface

Hanson, Anne Coffin

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Preface

Anne Coffin Hanson

Manet and the Modern Tradition

~Edouard Manet has long been recognized as a genius of the nineteenth century whose work has made a profound difference to the development of the art of our own age. His paintings have attracted the interest of many artists and historians, and books on his works run into the hundreds. There are several good catalogues of his entire oeuvre, and it...

Author

Anne Coffin Hanson

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.vi-ix

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00079.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15963

Preface

Edouard Manet has long been recognized as a genius of the nineteenth century whose work has made a profound difference to the development of the art of our own age. His paintings have attracted the interest of many artists and historians, and books on his works run into the hundreds. There are several good catalogues of his entire oeuvre, and it is probable that few new facts are still to be discovered about the man. Then why still another book on Manet?

The questions of his ‘originality’ and his obvious borrowings from the masters, his desire for conventional success, and his choice of shocking subjects and styles—these have been confronted many times and in many ways. In recent years interest has turned to a search for the precise sources for his motifs. From the vast literature a picture of a strange man has emerged. Not himself well-read, a friend of the important literary figures of his day; politically naive in a period of political turmoil; hard working but playful; painfully sensitive but self-assured—a man of duality, of paradox, attempting to reconcile his love of tradition with his compulsion to create the new. John Richardson, in a sensitive account of his personality, describes him as a ‘Janus-like figure’, ‘the forward looking rebel’, ‘the backward looking bourgeois’.1 John Richardson, Edouard Manet: Paintings and Drawings, London/New York, 1958, 5–6. For Bataille, he was a ‘compass needle thrown out of kilter’. With no choice but to make a clean break with the past he somehow lost confidence in himself.2 Georges Bataille, Manet, New York, 1955, 26. While all these elements were present, we seem to lack a picture of a real man, integrated enough to have produced some of the most forceful works of art of his century. It is perhaps time to look elsewhere for the ‘seemingly unreconcilable elements’ which Richardson finds in Manet’s character.3 Richardson, 6. His society may well be responsible for many of the dualities long ascribed to the artist alone, and his art should be seen in that context. To discover what a man owes to his own culture, to his past and to his present, should in no way reduce the value of his achievements. Instead, it should make the man and his changing times into natural and believable phenomena.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of dualities. The French were proud of their heritage but placed their hopes in a new and different future. They knew they had changed, were changing, and that they would change still more; and they were naturally both pleased with their progress and, simultaneously, fearful of its direction. This was Manet’s uneasy world, the ‘modern life’ he chose to depict.

This book is about the dualities which involved the artist: his dependence on the past, his struggle to create an expression for the future. It attempts to put into perspective the strong critical and philosophical call for a new art, to place into that context Manet’s adaptation of old and new imagery to his purposes, and to trace his technical development from traditional methods to a progressive approach. If Manet’s career is to be understood, the old distortions which divided nineteenth-century art into rival teams of entrenched ‘Academy’ on one side, and enlightened (and suffering) rebels on the other, must be forgotten, and replaced by knowledge of the more complex interchanges which really occurred. The flowering of landscape painting, the constant increase in interest in genre, and ultimately the ‘Realism’ of Courbet, set the stage for a new art of modern life. The depiction of ‘la vie moderne’ can certainly be considered realism in the sense that it records the sights and peoples of nineteenth-century Paris, but in practice the term meant only a certain kind of imagery which showed its fashionable and progressive side. By contrast ‘Realism’, the term adopted by Courbet at the time of his strong social interests, carried with it concepts about the working classes and convictions about their fate. Manet’s was not a social or political revolution, but the expansion of artistic means to embrace a new optimistic poetry dedicated to ‘the spirit of modern life’.

In preparing this book I have been helped by many more writers and friends than I can mention: often the most provocative ideas have come from my students who teach me as I try to teach them. My debts to fellow scholars will be made clear when I repeatedly refer to their works, for even when I choose to disagree with them I am grateful for their prodding. My thinking about the period and the man has been particularly influenced by Albert Boime, Alain de Leiris, Jean Collins Harris, Theodore Reff, John Richardson, and Nils Gösta Sandblad. George Heard Hamilton’s ideas on many subjects have taught me a great deal; his friendship has taught me even more. If from Joseph C. Sloane I learned how to use my mind so that I could argue with him, I find his constant confidence in me all the more rewarding. I owe this book to many people, but particularly to the two of them.

A number of museums and individuals have helped me obtain photographs and the permission to reproduce them. I wish particularly to thank Evan Turner, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Alan Shestack, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, for their generosity. Mlle Karen Hallberg of the Fondation Wildenstein has repeatedly helped me in many small ways. I am indebted to Nancy Walchli for her patient and efficient assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. Most of all I appreciate having had the opportunity to work with John Nicoll who combined a real understanding of my intentions with a sharp eye for the faults in the manuscript. For loving encouragement, I owe thanks to my husband and to many other friends.

This book was originally intended as an enlargement of the catalogue I wrote for the Manet exhibition held in Philadelphia and Chicago in 1966. I had hoped to rewrite and expand it almost immediately including paintings which were not obtainable for the exhibition and developing some of the ideas briefly stated in the introduction. Work was begun in 1967 thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Junior Research Award from Bryn Mawr College which together freed me from a year of teaching. The book was put into its final form in the spring of 1974 which I spent as a Resident in the History of Art at the American Academy in Rome, and devoted to the beginnings of another project as well. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity for uninterrupted work in a hospitable and stimulating atmosphere. For several years prior to my stay in Rome work on the book had been set aside because of the demands of other responsibilities. The loss of time and the many new publications on Manet in those years shortened my work and undoubtedly made this book less ponderous. Most of all, rethinking many issues has helped me realize how vast the questions are and how inadequately mere facts can answer them.

I originally chose to work on Edouard Manet because I found his paintings full of provocation and delight. Years later, they are still a constant joy and an unyielding puzzle. I hope this book will answer some of the reader’s questions about a great artist, but I am both pleased and concerned that the writing of it has not yet answered all of mine.

1 John Richardson, Edouard Manet: Paintings and Drawings, London/New York, 1958, 5–6. »

2 Georges Bataille, Manet, New York, 1955, 26. »

3 Richardson, 6. »

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